Phew!

I’m delighted to be able to say I completed the first Marathon of the North in Sunderland yesterday.

I hinted at this in my previous post, but midweek before the race I was feeling terrible—I’d had colds and aches; my last training run on Thursday was stereotypically awful, with bad cramps and a sore right knee that had me thinking evil thoughts about joint damage; and I spent much of Friday walking a bit like Dad did before his first hip operation.

So it was a great relief to find I felt better on Saturday and quite good on Sunday, to find the running painless once I got started, and actually to be able to finish the thing.

I had to stop and sit down, feeling sick and dizzy, with a few kilometres to go—but I got around in four hours and ten minutes and I’m jolly pleased with that. It seems to be considered a difficult course and my finishing time was only 53% over the winner’s, which I reckon is pretty fine.

Meanwhile, I’ve raised over four hundred quid for Shelter and I’m really pleased with that. Many thanks to everyone who has donated.

Is it good for Sunderland?

I think around 1500 people entered this event, and about 1100 finished it. The first Kielder Marathon, organised by the same people, managed a similar number of entrants despite being miles from the nearest city. The inaugural Brighton Marathon, in 2010, saw over 7000 participants, although that probably included a lot of Londoners who couldn’t get into the London marathon. This one doesn’t seem to have been all that popular.

I’m guessing that a ten-thousand-entrant marathon in your town would be pretty good for business, but one at this scale surely can’t be. There were a lot of complaints locally about road closures, and we heard that many business owners—hotels, taxis, pubs etc—felt there was a lot of local effort going into it in exchange for nothing but a big loss of custom. To put on an event like this for only 1500 runners is asking quite a lot.

But for the runners and spectators, this was a wonderful advertisement for Sunderland.

I grew up in and around Durham, but I haven’t often been to Sunderland and I’ve had an impression of it as a pleasant but rather characterless town on the river mouth. Running the marathon route has completely changed that impression for me. The route missed out most of the very visible modern commercial streets along the south bank of the Wear, instead covering streets with varied, mostly Victorian architecture, several lovely parks, long stretches of sandy coastline both north and south of the city centre—Sunderland comes across as a rather beautiful town, and this is a fantastic route for anyone who likes to look at their surroundings while they run.

For family supporters it was even better.

It’s true that watching a marathon can be pretty dull, and I’m full of gratitude to the people living along the route who had enough patience to keep cheering us on right to the end. (Early on in this event we ran past a couple of kids standing with bikes on a street corner, staring at us and saying “I can’t believe how boring this is”—I laughed at that; they were quite right.)

But for out-of-town supporters, although the sunny weather played a big part, the route here was ideal. It expanded and contracted like flower petals around a few streets in the centre, in a way that looked tricky on the map but that allowed my family to drift around the town centre, see some sights, have a coffee and still wave on their runner four times in different places on the route.

On the train back to London, we asked the kids: so, Sunderland—what did you think? They were both keen to come back. The beaches, the river and sea, the Winter Gardens cafe, the guest house with its excellent breakfast, the Roker amusements with two-penny coin-drops, the pub with the FA cup final, friendly people and nice food, being able to hang around at the Stadium of Light for the start and finish, waving at your dad while he runs: it’s a good deal for a bank holiday weekend.

I felt a bit of an awkward impostor, talking to the owner of our guest house at breakfast, in saying I hoped this event would be a big success in future years. It doesn’t seem to have been very helpful to them or their friends this year: they were right on the route and had just the one marathon-related booking (us) and a weekend of trouble.

But I do hope it’s a success. I’d like other people like me, who should perhaps know this already, to be shown what a fine town this is. I would hope that runners aren’t put off by the difficult course and will want to run it because of the interest and variety along the route. I’d like this to be a ten-thousand-runner marathon in a year or two, and I think it deserves to be.